Can Direct Payments Facilitate Agricultural Commercialisation: Evidence from a Transition Country

We investigate the impact of direct payments on agricultural commercialisation in Kosovo. Kosovo is one of the poorest countries in Europe but, with European assistance, provides substantial funds to support agriculture, made up of many small and often semi‐subsistence farms. Thus, the effect of this support is a central policy issue. Identifying the effect of direct payments on market participation faces endogeneity issues arising from the possible simultaneous determination of participation in support programmes and market participation. In order to achieve proper identification of the endogenous direct payments, we use a strategy of targeted identification search that employs several different methodological approaches. We find that direct payments for fruit and vegetables, and those for cereals and oilseeds have a positive effect on market participation. However, we cannot identify any definite effect of livestock payments.     

Gentlewomanly capitalism? Spinsters,widows, and wealth holding in England and Wales,c. 1800–1860

This article examines the demographic and geographical importance of wealthy middle-class women. It argues that in certain towns and cities, notably London, such women were of sufficient importance to merit attention in their own right. Drawing upon a sample of wills, it describes the types of wealth owned by these women. By examining women's investment in government securities, it argues that women's wealth was of crucial importance to the British state. Its findings challenge conventional understandings of the relationships between gender ideology, wealth holding, and economic development.     

The repeat travel market for Taiwan: A multi-stage segmentation approach

Despite the importance of market segmentation, the growth of the travel and tourism industry in Taiwan, and the repeat travel phenomenon in tourism, relatively few studies have examined the behavior of repeat travelers in the East Asia region. The present study was designed to fill this gap. This exploratory study applied multistage segmentation in the context of repeat travel behavior to Taiwan. It examined the socio-demographic profile, trip characteristics and expenditures of Taiwan inbound repeat travelers. The results indicated that nationality, income, type of travel arrangements and information search behavior significantly affected repeat travel behavior. In terms of travel expenditures, males spent significantly more than females. Those travelers between 40 and 60 years old tended to spend the most when they visited Taiwan compared to other groups. Chinese travelers were most likely to have traveled to Taiwan more than once among all nationalities compared in this study. Those from Korea and Japan spent the most money among all nationality groups. This study provided several significant implications for the marketers of tourism in Taiwan.     

Information in generalized method of moments estimation and entropy-based moment selection

In this paper, we make five contributions to the literature on information and entropy in generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation. First, we introduce the concept of the long run canonical correlations (LRCCs) between the true score vector and the moment function f(_vt,_θ0)$f(v_t,{\theta }_0)$ and show that they provide a metric for the information contained in the population moment condition E[f(_vt,_θ0)]=0$\mathrm{E}[f(v_t,{\theta }_0)]=0$. Second, we show that the entropy of the limiting distribution of the GMM estimator can be written in terms of these LRCCs. Third, motivated by the above results, we introduce an information criterion based on this entropy that can be used as a basis for moment selection. Fourth, we introduce the concept of nearly redundant moment conditions and use it to explore the connection between redundancy and weak identification. Fifth, we analyse the behaviour of the aforementioned entropy-based moment selection method in two scenarios of interest; these scenarios are: (i) nonlinear dynamic models where the parameter vector is identified by all the combinations of moment conditions considered; (ii) linear static models where the parameter vector may be weakly identified for some of the combinations considered. The first of these contributions rests on a generalized information equality that is proved in the paper, and may be of interest in its own right.     

Comparative judgement for assessment

Historically speaking, students were judged long before they were marked. The tradition of marking, or scoring, pieces of work students offer for assessment is little more than two centuries old, and was introduced mainly to cope with specific problems arising from the growth in the numbers graduating from universities as the industrial revolution progressed. This paper describes the principles behind the method of Comparative Judgement, and in particular Adaptive Comparative Judgement, a technique borrowed from psychophysics which is able to generate extremely reliable results for educational assessment, and which is based on the kind of holistic evaluation that we assume was the basis for judgement in pre-marking days, and that the users of assessment results expect our assessment schemes to capture.     

Econometricians Have Their Moments: GMM at 32

The 2013 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Eugene Fama, Lars Hansen and Robert Shiller for their work on empirical asset pricing. Hansen's primary contribution to the cited work was the development of the generalised method of moments (GMM), a statistical method that has proved such a valuable tool for testing the validity of empirical asset pricing models. The public announcement of the award also acknowledges the wider impact of GMM on empirical analysis in economics and beyond, referring to the 1982 Econometrica paper in which Hansen introduced the method as ‘one of the most influential in econometrics’. In this paper, we reflect on how the GMM‐based inference framework has evolved since 1982, reviewing developments on four main issues: model diagnostic testing, moment selection, identification and inference in misspecified models. We also illustrate the broader influence of GMM on econometrics by briefly exploring the connections between GMM and three other estimation methods: indirect inference, moment inequality based techniques, and a group of techniques that can be presented equivalently within either the generalised empirical likelihood or info‐metric frameworks.     

国家视角下的目的地形象模型——基于来华国际游客的实证研究

国家形象和目的地形象因其对消费者行为和决策的重要影响,分别发展成为国际商务领域和旅游营销领域的重要概念和研究热点,虽然两者具有十分密切的内在联系,但学界对它们的研究却相对独立,缺少交叉研究.该研究在对两个领域的文献和理论模型进行整理后,将目的地形象放置到国家尺度下重新审视,试图揭示一个国家的综合国家形象与其作为旅游目的地的形象之间的互动机制,并尝试引入“熟悉度”等概念建立整合模型.最后以中国大陆为案例地,以来华国际游客为调查对象,通过结构方程模型进行实证检验和修正.结论指出:(1)熟悉度对目的地形象有正向影响;(2)国家形象与目的地形象之间具有双向且正向的影响;(3)国家形象通过目的地形象对游客的忠诚度产生间接影响.